+- .- 7", .- } . .' .... t . ,. , "'-iI'''':- ,".( t<: u' . >, ' , ;...(o ,^ ,. : ", 'if. .". " .:,' ':, ,_r0X, Ok ... A CRITIC AT LARGE THE FIGHTER Rereading Robert Lowell BY ANTHONY LANE W hen Robert Lowell was alive, you could barely make him out be- neath a forest of garlands. In April, 1947, after the publication of his second book, "Lord Weary's Castle," he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize. Life ran a feamre, and a Hollywood producer called Lowell's pub- lisher to inquire whether the poet had con- sidered a career in the movies. (Back came the answer: He had not, but thanks for asking.) After that, there were few periods in which Lowell was not harried by fame, or by infam its surly younger brother. A typical encomium was this, from Hay- den Carruth in the autumn of 1967, drop- ping to his knees in the Hudson Review: I envy Lowell. Everywhere I go among literary people I meet only others who envy Lowell. . . . Let anyone say what he will, Lowell is our leading poet. It is a fact. He has power, influence, and an enormous reputation. His books., for example, are kept in print and they sell steadily-what a joy that must be! Ah yes, what joy. There have always been poets, Byron above all, whose lives, in the stained arena of the public mind, have fought for supremacy with their work, but in Lowell's case the struggle was unnaturally frantic, whipped along by his own reckonings of familial strife. His three marriages were cyclonic, but they were easily outnumbered, and out- blasted, by his episodes of manic depres- sion, and, more happily; by the gusts of his poetic enthusiasm. When he re-wrought Sappho, Montale, Rimbaud, Villon, Pasternak, and Baudelaire, among others, into "Imitations," in 1961, the question of whether these were responsible transla- tions, or manglings, or--as Lowell him- self wished-the minting of something new was a matter of extravagant debate. By the time he died, in 1977, at the un- just age of sixty, he had spent twenty years or more as, if not an American pontiff: then, at least, as one of the more senior cardinals of the culture As Eliza- beth Bishop, whom Lowell loved and ad- mired, wrote, in a tribute to "Life Studies," "In the middle of our worst centurY so .I far, we have produced a magnificent poet." Since his death, Lowell has yielded the high, commanding ground in Amer- ican letters that he held during his life; in the meantime, Sylvia Plath has consoli- dated her position, while time has been kind to Adrienne Rich and, especially, to Bishop herself This is not merely a change of fashion. If the shade of Low- ell is no longer central to our view of po- etry; that may be because poetry itself is no longer central to our lives, or, at any rate, to the way in which we reach for other voices in the quest to lend articulate energy to those lives. He is not so much a lost figure, one might sa as the last of his kind. When he worked as an informal adviser to Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 Presidential campaign, there was some mockery of what was, in essence, an in- tellectual companionship, but it was not thought utterly strange that a poet should consort with a power seeker. Is that still the case? If somebody of Lowell's rec- ord sought to hang out with a Demo- cratic challenger in 2004, for instance, would the Secret Service not invite him to leave by the nearest window? Now we have a chance to revisit that eminence. Head for the poetry section of your bookstore and look for a cuboid chunk of verbal muscle: "Robert Lowell: Collected Poems" (Farrar, Straus & Gi- roux; $45), edited by Frank Bidart and D dG anreLThk throo Low is to undergo not a seduction but an as- sault. What is at issue here is not merely the thrashing vehemence of his lines, whereby even the songbirds that herald spring can be recruited to the cause of the ominous ("the forest / Is noosed in Lowell with his daughter, Harriet, in New York City, in 1960. Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson.